flights

“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, “Business as usual.” But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story… These people fail to realise that it is only on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves.”

Let God defend God.

I remember spotting Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” when it first started to appear in book shops. Its cover illustration is one of the loveliest to grace a book in recent memory and probably deserves some credit for the book’s instant popularity.

It’s a sweet book – not a lightweight story, but not life-changing one either. It tells the tale of a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi (short for Piscene, as in fish-ish) Patel who becomes the solitary human survivor of the sunk cargo ship, Tsintsum, adrift in a lonely lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. His companions on the boat are a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450 pound (205 kg) Bengal tiger bearing the unlikely name, Richard Parker.
Continue reading ‘life of pi and runaway horses’ »

The other night a small group of us went to see a play called “godeatgod” by local playrwright, Haresh Sharma.

On our first or second day here, Tracy handed me an eye-catching post card, and ever since then I’d been spotting them around town.

post cards for godeatgod

The cards quote a review from the sold-out 2002 run and describe the show as “a layered and moving exploration of power, sexuality, spirituality and survival in the post-traumatic world”. A review in the Straits Times summed up the play as “the perfect antidote to rambling or too-glib experimental theatre pieces disconnected from the flesh-and-blood of human suffering”.

As such, we thought it might also be the perfect antidote to the painful US election results.
Continue reading ‘godeatgod’ »

Ex-Wired staffer (and ex-colleague of Tracy’s) John Battelle, who dilligently authors Searchblog, recently mentioned a 1993 William Gibson article about Singapore entitled “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.” It’s an interesting read. Apparently it got the magazine banned in Singapore for a while (maybe it’s still banned – I was actually looking for it the other day, without success).

It’s been his show all night
the man who can talk as long as you want
about any subject you choose:

Driving. He laughs inappropriately
telling you about the woman killed in her car
by a single falling rock.
Continue reading ‘we laugh’ »

There once was a man who wouldn’t eat for eleven days because he couldn’t bear the sounds food made in his mouth. His family summoned doctors, lawyers, a hypnotist. On the twelfth day, the man asked for a reuben sandwich, a side of cole slaw and a dill pickle.

a beautiful girl
waiting inside the red van
with her dalmatian

There was an artist from a poor country who loved to paint pictures of the storefronts in his home town. One day, a small group of passionate young men and women arose to overthrow the government. They used his painting of a small town shoe store as the cover for their pamphlet. The government managed to put down this small uprising. Then they sent troops to arrest the painter, who was taken to prison, where he died many years later.

Two soldiers stationed on an island once quarreled over a girl they knew back home. In anger, one man shot the other, but not fatally. As there were no witnesses, the first man buried the wounded man alive during the night. The military police investigated but came to no conclusions. The man never told anyone his secret, and eventually the whole episode became such a faint memory that he couldn’t say for sure whether it had actually happened at all.

I’ve been re-reading bits of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy:
book 1 – Spring Snow
book 2 – Runaway Horses
book 3 – The Temple of Dawn
book 4 – The Decay of the Angel.

Basically in a Japanese phase, I guess. I’ve been devouring Murakami. Of his books, the only ones I haven’t read are his two collections of short stories (The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake) and Underground, his nonfiction account of the Tokyo subway gas attacks.

I have a strange need to share what I so love about his books, but I find it tremendously difficult to put it into words.

Each of his books contains a central mystery – a search for a missing person, for example – and that’s certainly part of what makes them compelling, like all good mysteries. So he clearly has a love for mystery, though he’s not at all a mystery author in the genre fiction sense of the word. There’s also a touch of sci-fi in his books, which in his case is more often considered surrealism and referred to as such by his critics and scholars.

There is a kind of melancholy that pervades his plots and characters, and a familiar vulnerability. There’s also an awkwardness – mostly mechanical – which could be a function of translation. None of this, however, gets at the heart of why I love his books.

When I finished reading ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” I surprised myself by suddenly bursting into tears. There was no sense of being gradually overcome by emotion, no lump in my throat. I literally burst. It is that thing I love about his books that prompted my outpouring, and I’m realizing I’m absolutely not able to put it into words.

His books have a kind of stunning clarity on a level that my soul seems to understand by my mind can’t package.

So, in the end, I’m failing once again to express what I like about his books, but I can safely say he’s my bedside table successor to Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy.